Right now, we are standing on the street.
I was watching a movie this morning (Japan’s Netflix is BEAUTIFUL and I almost feel like I should extend just so I can take a guilt free movie day but anyways) when Marisa comments on how long the sirens have been going off and how they sound like they aren’t moving.
Some part of my mind had registered that there were sirens, but had some how managed to classify it as not super important when compared to Netflix.
So thank God for Marisa.
We go to look out the window and there on the street were three fire trucks and about a dozen firemen. There’s also a crowd of non-fire equipped people. One of them waves at us to come down.
Cue the realization that maybe the fire trucks are out there for our building. After a quick destruction of the room to find our passports and a mad dash to the outside, we join the crowd and here we are now.
It smells a little bit like fire, but not really. There’s a police man taking a statement from a guy, but I cannot read nor understand Japanese, so I’m pretty much where I started, other than the fact that there’s a statement makes me feel like it wasn’t a fire.
Marisa is using her people skills and talking to a guy and trying to figure out what happened. I’m still trying to stealth peak at the policeman’s notepad even though the chance of me gleaning any kind of information from that is nonexistent.
–
We are back inside.
Our building wasn’t on fire. Turns out the guy that Marisa talked to had woken up to his apartment falling, which is vague and also unsettling. He had the sleepy blaséness when talking about it that only the freshly awoken can have, even if your apartment fell. It reminded me of finals week. We saw him again at Family Mart buying lots of snacks (I would have bought lots of snacks after that too). He was very smiley and incredibly nice, so I think he’s okay. Just tired, which is understandable.
General chaos feat. man with fallen apartment.
Other than our building not being on fire, the good news is that the typhoon hasn’t hit yet. It’s very calm outside, which I guess is normal.
So, we’re going to try and get food while it’s still dry out and get back before it starts.
–
We got ramen.
I had two eggs.
The typhoon is here.
It hit while we were eating. We could feel the mist of it the second we stepped out of the restaurant, even though we were undercover.
Leaving the safety of the airbnb was probably not our wisest move, but the logic was that you only Japan once. Which, now seems pretty stupid. There are a lot of stores closed up with signs on them. One has English on it that says its closed for the storm, so I’m imagining that that’s what most of them are saying. We also kept seeing people leaving Family Mart with lots of water and snacks. But why stay in the safety of the airbnb with snacks when there is ramen out there?
That seems to be a common theme with tourists. The streets were absolutely empty around our airbnb, but as soon as we stepped out into Namba (food + store=tourist), it was just as crowded as any other day. So if we die, at least we all die together, united in that Special Brand of foreigner stupidity.
So, instead of returning to our apartment and being responsible, we decided to go back to the void store. I think everyone else trying to take shelter from the typhoon had the same idea. I don’t have that much money left, so I just wandered. But there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of people, and a lot of lights and on your fifth go around of the make up floor, it gets little overwhelming.
So now I’m sitting on a walkway under a bridge. There are a few people out and most of the stores have closed up, so the streets are mostly empty. There’s a guy on the other side of the river from me with an orange bag. He’s stretching. The bridge has lights that look gothic and a little out of place with the surroundings. But the light is warm and makes the underside of the bridge feel safe.
I don’t know. It’s always nice being outside when other people aren’t. It’s that 3 am vibe. It’s special.
It’s dark for afternoon time and while most of the shops have closed, a few still have their signs still on, so the river has a bunch of nice reflections. There’s a takoyaki place with a giant octopus sign. Expect the sign is broken and the octopuses eye is flashing at an alarming rate, like it’s some kind of urban demon trying to lure in unsuspecting victims. The wind is pretty consistent. It’s nice, like how when you’re standing on the platform and the train pulls in and you can feel it moving your baby hairs and sliding past your neck.
It might be a biased view, but before it started to rain, you could kind of feel it in the air. It was very quiet out. The big quiet, when there’s nothing going on, not on this street, or the next one. Or for the entire block. There’s no one out, making noises that provide the background sounds of city living.
Kelly said I was bullshitting because I knew the storm was coming. I probably was, but who cares. It’s fun to feel like you can feel the world.
I could definitely feel the storm when it started raining though.
–
There’s something to be said for good sushi.
There’s a place near our Airbnb that always has a line out the door. But today, people were inside because of the storm, so there was no wait.
And what do you do when you’re out in a storm and too dumb to go back to your house after you already left to eat?
Eat again.
I think the danger of sushi places is that you can just keep ordering until you decide you’re done.
So you can imagine the moral turmoil of salmon vs. money (I know what I said about money and food but that Kobe beef hurt the pockets a little bit and I didn’t start feeling bad about it until after I wrote that) and I’m kind of a slut for salmon.
Beyond that, it was really just sushi, good sushi, but still. The important part of this was the people next to us.
I aspire to either have the kind of job they have or the mental blockage of fund knowledge that allowed them to do what they did at that restaurant. They were there before we sat down and were still ordering when we left. It was Powerful. I got a little nervous that we were in the presence of two gods who were weathering the storm with sushi and whiskey.
I think what was also really cool about this place (and other food/shops) is the way the building works. It kind of ties back in with the whole infrastructure thing I talked about last time. The stores are all very long and narrow and often times have multiple sets of stairs that lead up to higher floors. When you go up the (usually super narrow and very steep) stairs and it opens up into another floor of seating, it feels a little bit like you’ve been let into a secret club house. Buildings that look like simple businesses or apartments actually have so much going on within them. The Void Store is kind of like that too. You would never guess by looking at it (well, you would with this one. It has a giant ferris wheel attached to the outside of it. But if it didn’t have that) that it had six floors chocked full of florescent lights, stuff you probably don’t need but will buy anyways, and people. Besides the first floor, that has products that spill out into the street, the rest of the building is nondescript (again, except for the giant ferris wheel).
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